KIRKUS REVIEW

A literary critic questions the
effect of digital technology on minds, literature, and creativity.

Although he uses computers, email,
and GPS, Birkerts (The Other Walk: Essays, 2011, etc.), director of the
Bennington Writing Seminars and editor of the literary journal AGNI at Boston University, wonders how
those technologies have changed both the content they convey and users’
connections to “the unmediated world…are these fabulous gains of access and ease
really given without a counterbalancing sacrifice?” That choice of the word
“sacrifice” reflects the author’s suspicion, reiterated in many of these
previously published essays, that “new technologies and behaviors have a way of
encroaching almost visibly” to change the way we think—usually for the worst. When
we use a search engine, he asserts, “we give over any real sense of control
over our contexts…making ourselves that much more fit to be nodes in a larger
system, that much less our independent selves.” When we use GPS, we risk
“floating weightlessly from here to there without a strong notion of origins or
destination.” Birkerts points to studies in neuroscience that find “short-term
adaptations and neural reconfigurings” as a result of “digital expansion.”
Long-term effects, he acknowledges, are still unknown. The author worries,
especially about the possibility that imagination may become compromised “every
time another digital prosthesis appears and puts another thin layer of
sheathing between ourselves and the essential givens of our existence.” He also
worries that these prostheses give us a skewed sense of agency and power; in
his opinion, agency is being diminished: “If being a Luddite has come to mean
refusing to rubber-stamp without questioning everything that passes for progress,
then where do I sign up?” Following the visual paths of paintings, listening
intently to a musical composition, and reading books, he insists, are analogous
to prayer.

Cogent and thoughtful, if nostalgic,
essays urging our attention not to iPads and smartphones but to art.

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